Sancti Spiritus, Cuba, 1993 © Alex Webb/Magnum Photos

Photography Workshop at Aperture with Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb
This one-day workshop is geared for documentary photographers, street photographers, and others who photograph the world with a camera—not for those who dramatically manipulate their photographs. Also includes public gallery talk with Alex Webb about his exhibition, Alex Webb: The Suffering of Light, at Aperture Gallery from 4:00 to 5:00 pm. The exhibition features works from his recently published book The Suffering of Light.

Saturday, December 17, 2011
10:00 am–5:00 pm

$225 (Tickets are non-refundable)
Purchase tickets to the event

Do you know where you’re going next with your photography––or where it’s taking you? This intensive one-day workshop will help photographers begin to understand their own distinct way of seeing the world. It will also help photographers figure out their next step photographically ––from deepening their own unique vision to the process of discovering and making a long-term project that they’re passionate about.

A workshop for serious amateurs and professionals alike, it will begin with reviews of each photographer’s work, serving as a jumping off point for a larger discussion about various photographic issues. Alex and Rebecca, a creative team who often edit projects and books together –– including their book and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, exhibition, “Violet Isle: A Duet of Photographs from Cuba”––will explore with the class a series of topics, including the process of photographing spontaneously and intuitively; how to photograph in cultures other than one’s own; how to edit photographs intuitively; the emotional and psychological implications of working in color vs. black and white; the difference between images in a book and images on the wall; and how long-term projects can evolve into books and exhibitions. Participants should be prepared to ask questions, as these concerns will help shape the ultimate direction of the workshop. This one-day workshop is geared for documentary photographers, street photographers, and others who photograph the world with a camera––not for those who dramatically manipulate their photographs.

Aperture Gallery and Bookstore
547 W. 27th Street, 4th Floor
New York, NY
(212) 505-5555

The workshop is offered at the discounted price of $175 for full-time students and Aperture members. Please call (212) 505-5555 to reserve at this special rate, or buy tickets through Aperture’s website.

Alex Webb is best known for his vibrant and complex color work, especially from Latin America and the Caribbean. He has published nine books, including Istanbul: City of a Hundred Names, and his most recent, The Suffering of Light: Thirty Years of Photographs (Aperture). Alex has exhibited at museums worldwide including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, and the Guggenheim Museum, NY. Alex became a full member of Magnum Photos in 1979. His work has appeared in National Geographic, the New York Times Magazine, Geo, and other magazines. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007 for continuing working in Cuba, and the Premio Internacional de Fotografia Alcobendas in 2009.

For the past decade, Rebecca Norris Webb has been exploring the complicated relationship between people and the natural world. Originally a poet, she has shown her photographic work internationally, including at the George Eastman House Museum and Ricco Maresca Gallery, New York. Her first book, The Glass Between Us, was published in 2006, and her second book, Violet Isle: A Duet of Photographs from Cuba (with Alex Webb), was published in November 2009. Her photographs are in the collections of the George Eastman House Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, and she is represented by the Photographers’ Gallery in London. Rebecca’s work has appeared in Time, New Letters, Orion, and other magazines. Her third book, My Dakota, will be published in 2012 by Radius, and exhibited at the Dahl Arts Center in Rapid City, South Dakota.

Alex and Rebecca have a joint exhibition of their Cuba photographs at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which will run until January 16, 2012, which will then travel to the Southeast Museum of Photography in Daytona, Florida. The couple is currently collaborating on a project in the U.S.

WHAT PHOTOGRAPHERS SHOULD BRING: About 30 photography prints (can be inexpensive 5×7” or 8×10” work prints; we are most interested in the image not the quality of the print). For those who are working in a series or on a long-term project, feel free to bring one or two projects. Class limit: 17. For more information, contact Rebecca at rebeccanorriswebb@yahoo.com.

Last June, acclaimed Magnum photographer Alex Webb gave an Artist Talk on release of his book, The Suffering of Light: Thirty Years of Photographs. This exquisite publication is the first comprehensive monograph charting the career of the acclaimed American photographer. The collection presents his most iconic images, many of which were taken in the far corners of the earth, and brings a fresh perspective to his extensive catalog.

Alex Webb‘s photographs have appeared in a wide range of publications, including the New York Times Magazine, Life, Stern, and National Geographic, and have been exhibited at the International Center of Photography, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. He is a recipient of the Leica Medal of Excellence (2000) and the Premio Internacional de Fotografia Alcobendas (2009). Webb, a member of Magnum Photos since 1976, lives in New York City.

Find The Suffering of Light: Thirty Years of Photographs here.

Find Webb’s earlier book Istanbul: City of a Hundred Names here.

Alex Webb’s exhibition The Suffering of Light will be on view at Aperture Bookstore & Gallery beginning December 8, 2011 and running through January 19, 2012. Find the accompanying monograph here.

Aperture Gallery and Bookstore
547 West 27th Street, 4th Floor
Between 10th and 11th Avenues
New York, New York

Interview by Anna Carnick

Alex Webb, self portrait in Hong Kong while on press for The Suffering of Light.

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Aperture is pleased to introduce “SNAPSHOT,” a new series of interviews with photography’s luminaries, inspired by the Proust Questionnaire. For our series debut, we spoke with the always thoughtful, ever-surprising Alex Webb.

Webb’s latest photography collection, The Suffering of Light: Thirty Years of Photographs by Alex Webb, is available now through Aperture.

AC: How do you describe your personality?
AW: Obsessive, persistent––maybe even Sisyphean––but with a sense of humor.

What is your idea of happiness?
I suspect pure happiness is only attainable for brief periods.  Creative fulfillment, however, seems like a more sustainable goal––taking the work one believes in to its ultimate end.

What do you believe is your greatest achievement as an artist so far?
If I’ve made some sort of contribution to photography––and that’s not for me to say––I think it’s about having discovered a way of working in intense color in the tropics with an eye towards the enigmatic, the unexpected, and the sometimes paradoxical.

I also think that Rebecca Norris Webb and I have made a small but unique contribution to the history of photographic collaborations with the Violet Isle project, a project which created a more complicated portrait of the island––and its people and animals––than either of our individual visions could have done alone.

If you weren’t a photographer, what would you be?
Perhaps a novelist, though I am quite sure that I would have failed miserably at it.  I think I need the immediacy of the experience of the world for inspiration.  I think I do much better walking the streets and responding with a camera than staring at a blank sheet of paper in a room.

Who is your favorite artist, of any genre?
Blues is my favorite kind of music, and I love Buddy Guy’s music––though I think Stevie Ray Vaughn’s version of Little Wing is pretty special . . .

What is your favorite photograph?
I have a lot of favorite photographs, but I’ll mention one that has lingered in my mind for many years: Robert Frank’s picture of the back of a hearse-like vehicle in London.  I love the open-ended questions that Frank’s photograph poses:  Is that a hearse? Where exactly is that child in the fog running––and why?

The last book you really enjoyed?
I recently read Vargas Llosa’s The Way to Paradise, a novel that interweaves the lives of Flora Tristan, a nineteenth century social activist, and her grandson, the painter Paul Gauguin.  The depiction of the latter is particularly compelling.

Name a person—living or dead—you’d really like to meet.
I wouldn’t even know where to begin. . . . I suppose, if I spoke Russian, I would have liked to have met Tolstoy–especially on his estate.

What qualities do you appreciate most in friends?
I think probably a good-natured sense of humor, especially the ability to laugh at yourself.

Your favorite motto?
I love the following from the sculptor Henry Moore, from late in his life:

The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for the rest of your life. And the most important thing is, it must be something you cannot possibly do.

Anna Carnick is a Brooklyn-based writer and editor. Previously the editor of both Graphis Inc. and Clear Magazine, she has been an Aperture editor since 2010. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Style Magazine (The Moment), Photo District News (PDN), PopPhoto.com, Dazed & Confused, Casa Vogue, Dwell.com, Coolhunting.com, and others.

Join acclaimed Magnum photographer Alex Webb in conversation with writer and artist Max Kozloff on the release of Webb’s latest monograph, The Suffering of Light: Thirty Years of Photographs. This exquisite book is the first comprehensive monograph charting the career of the acclaimed American photographer. The collection presents his most iconic images, many of which were taken in the far corners of the earth, and brings a fresh perspective to his extensive catalog.

Alex Webb‘s photographs have appeared in a wide range of publications, including the New York Times Magazine, Life, Stern, and National Geographic, and have been exhibited at the International Center of Photography, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. He is a recipient of the Leica Medal of Excellence (2000) and the Premio Internacional de Fotografia Alcobendas (2009). Webb, a member of Magnum Photos since 1976, lives in New York City.

Max Kozloff currently lives in New York City. Kozloff was schooled as an art historian at the University of Chicago and the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. He wrote the Art Column for The Nation during the 1960s, was a contributing editor at Art International and Artforum from 1963 to 1974, and was Executive Editor of Artforum from 1974 to 1976. He published a monograph on Jasper Johns, and the books Renderings and Cultivated Impasses. In 1976, he switched his attention to writing on photography. His work in that medium includes three collections of essays, a monograph on Duane Michals, New York: Capital of Photography (a catalogue for the show he curated at the Jewish Museum in 2002), and the book The Theatre of the Face: Portrait Photography Since 1900. Kozloff began showing his own color photographs at the Holly Solomon Gallery in 1977 and has exhibited at the Marlborough and P.P.O.W galleries in New York, as well as institutions in Buenos Aires, Bombay, Mexico City and London.

Wednesday, June 1, 6:30 pm

FREE

Aperture Gallery and Bookstore

A sheet from Photographic Memory and one from Alex Webb’s The Suffering of Light on press in Hong Kong.

Photo by Alex Webb

A test of the cover for Photographic Memory before the images have been applied.

With our spring titles starting to print, it is a busy time for Aperture. Both Photographic Memory, which explores the role of the photo album in the history of photography, and Alex Webb’s newest monograph, The Suffering of Light, a survey of thirty years of his career, are on press together at the same printer. Alex and his wife, Rebecca Norris Webb, sent me a snapshot from Hong Kong of two press sheets, one from each book, stacked together at the plant. Read about their experience on press with Alex’s book.

Though printing marks the start of the book’s life in the world, it is often a bittersweet moment for me, as an editor, because it signals the end of the bookmaking process, which is the most fun and rewarding part of my job. I like to think that when a book has been a pleasure to create, this shows in the final product. At least I hope this is the case for Photographic Memory, which I’ve been working on for two years in collaboration with the Library of Congress and author Verna Curtis, a curator of photography there. It’s been an amazing experience. I’ve had the opportunity to spend time with handmade albums by some of photography’s most important figures—like F. Holland Day, Edward Sherriff Curtis, and Walker Evans—and to gain new insight through Verna’s expertise. So, in turn, will those who read the book! A few of my favorites include an album by Leni Riefenstahl of the 1936 Olympics that culminates in a spectacular diving sequence; an album that Jim Goldberg made in a registry book from the rundown California hotel where he shot portraits of the inhabitants; an extraordinary family album by Danny Lyon; and an album containing beautiful, almost haunting mug-shots from a Philippine Prison in 1916.

I was thrilled to receive a test of the cover in the office, struck by how handsome it looked even without the tip-on photos in place and also by how different it became as a real thing, as opposed to the printouts and PDFs I had grown accustomed to poring over. Watching the book make this transition from files to object is magical, not unlike photography itself.
—Denise Wolff

Mug-shots from the 1916 Bureau of Prisons Album

Alex Webb was featured in Aperture Magazine 181 and Aperture Foundation published his book Istanbul: City of a Hundred Names.

Click here to purchase Aperture Magazine 181

Click here to purchase Alex Webb’s Istanbul: City of a Hundred Names